Google and Bing Keep Rising While Yahoo Drops Again

For those keeping score, here’s how the rankings of search engines have changed since Microsoft entered the race with Bing six months ago.

Google, of course, remains the runaway leader and there are no signs that its market share will do anything other than keep inching up. It went from 65 percent in May to 65.6 in November, according to data released by comScore to analysts late on Tuesday.

No. 3 Bing rose from 8 percent in May to 10.3 percent in November, a two-year high for Microsoft, whose previous search engine, Live Search, had been on a prolonged slide. The rise, fueled in part by a costly marketing campaign and rebates through its Cashback program, has been slow but steady, which is no doubt seen as good news in Redmond, Wash. (In an apparent effort to keep up its forward momentum, Microsoft released a Bing iPhone application late on Tuesday.)

Things are not so bright for No. 2 Yahoo. Its share in May, 20.1 percent, has eroded steadily to 17.5 percent. At recent conference the chief executive, Carol Bartz, attributed some of the losses to toolbar distribution deals with the likes of Acer or H.P. that are ending. But her words didn’t seem have had a soothing effect on analysts.

Yahoo’s “17.5 percent November search share represents its lowest level ever…again,” wrote Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech. “Although the company will likely point to the lingering effect of less profitable distribution deals rolling off, initial user adjustment to the new homepage, Bing’s cash-back offers, and its own internal data which indicated a different trend last month, there is no getting around the fact that the market share trend for Yahoo is absolutely awful.”

Cyrus Modanlou, analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, also acknowledged the loss of distribution deals but seemed downright gloomy about Yahoo’s prospects nonetheless. “There is no safeguarding against further query share losses at Yahoo,” he wrote in a report.

Yahoo, of course, has signed a deal to farm out much of its search operation to Microsoft. But unless it holds on to its share of the search market, that deal will prove a lot less lucrative for the still struggling company.